Literacy

Until the advent of mass education in the
Western world in the nineteenth century, most people could not read
or write. Writing in most ancient civilisations was restricted to a
fairly small and powerful elite. It was a useful tool in the
creation of empires and kingdoms through administration and
record-keeping.

The power of writing

This great skill was used to record payments
of taxes and tributes to kings and rulers, and to keep track of the
numbers of tax-payers in censuses. It was used to record commercial
contracts and transactions between individuals, of goods and
services bought and sold, and of the cost involved. Some of the
earliest written texts from Mesopotamia and Egypt are of this kind.
Cuneiform tablets from ancient southern Iraq, for example, record
the allocation of rations to workers. Therefore, writing has been a
means of organisation and keeping wealth and power.

In ancient Egypt levels of literacy were very low, less than one
per cent. However, in some places we have evidence that a lot
of people in that particular place able to read and write. Deir
el-Medina, a walled
village was home to the high middle-class officials working
on building and decorating the New Kingdom tombs in the
Valley of the Kings.

A stone ostrakon found there records work attendance In
280 days of Year 40 of the reign of Ramesses II (about 1279-1213
BC), only about 70 seem to have been full working days.

The list of forty names is accompanied by the reasons for their
absence, such as illness, the death of relatives and purifications
- perhaps relating to childbirth. Occasionally a man is away
'building his house', or at 'his festival' or even ‘drinking’.

Learning how to read and write

In order to make sure records were kept and
understood, reading and writing have always been studied. In
ancient Mesopotamia, schooling began at an early age.

Boys (and very rarely girls) learned how to
make a tablet and handle the stylus used to make impressions in the
clay. After learning the basic cuneiform signs students went on to
learn the thousands of different Sumerian words. The teacher would
write lines on one side of a tablet and students would turn it over
and try to reproduce them. After training, students could call
themselves dubsar or scribe and they became a member of a
privileged class.

A public display

Even
though literacy has traditionally been only for the wealthy,
writing has been consistently used throughout history as a means of
recording ideas and information in public proclamations. Kings and
emperors set up inscriptions proclaiming their titles and
chronicling their victories over their enemies. The Greek city of
Athens in the fifth century BC recorded the decisions of its
democratic constitution in public inscriptions. This made the
political process open and accountable.

Private communications

People have also used writing to record and
communicate their thoughts and wishes in private or to friends and
colleagues, even during periods of very limited literacy. Letters
inscribed on clay and sealed in clay envelopes are preserved from
ancient Mesopotamia and in the Egyptian, Greek and Roman worlds,
ink and papyrus were widely used for private correspondence.

One of the oldest surviving handwritten
documents in Britain is an invitation to a birthday party. It is
one of the so-called Vindolanda tablets, a collection of letters
and other pieces of writing on strips of tree bark from one of the
main military outposts on the northern frontier of Roman
Britain.

The invitation from Claudia Severa, wife of
Aelius Brocchus, is for Sulpicia Lepidina, wife of Flavius
Cerealis. It was mostly written by a scribe, but Severa’s writing
can also be seen. The tablet is one of the earliest known examples
of writing in Latin by a woman.

The art of reading and writing

In many societies, a special room would be set
aside within a wealthy household for private writing and study. In
east Asian and Islamic cultures, the furniture of writing, pens and
boxes, became extremely ornate, and the art of penmanship, or
calligraphy, highly prized as a sign of learning or social
prestige.

Until the
end of the Edo period (AD 1868), every literate Japanese person had
a personal writing-box containing brushes, ink-stone, ink-stick and
water-dropper. The quality of the craftsmanship reflected the
status of the owner.

Right up to modern times, literacy has been a
highly prized skill. In China a simplified script was created to
help improve literacy during the 1940s and 50s. But, while in
developed countries most people learn to read and write at school,
there are still people with very limited levels of literacy, if any
at all, all over the world.